Commentaries on
Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Poems
Shakespeare, William. Poems. (Norton Romances and Poems, 3rd ed., pp. 539-721).
Of Interest: Sonnets, The First Quarto, 1609 |
Shakespeare’s Sonnet Cycle: Notes on Selected Sonnets
Some things to look for:
In The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, critic Helen Vendler does a great job with both themes and the structural and linguistic qualities of Shakespeare’s sonnets. [1] Here are the main things I’m looking for in the sonnets:
1. How, in the midst of a rather showy poetic form, Shakespeare still conveys any number of emotional and intellectual states, from near-despair, confusion, jealousy, and alienation to triumph, clarity, a sense of deep and abiding attachment or love, and joy.
2. The sort of claims made for language and art in relation to expressivity, time’s passage, aging, and mortality.
3. How Shakespeare’s sonnets reflect on and respond to an already long tradition and well-worn set of conventions among his fellow poets, such as the description of peerlessly beautiful and graceful, but entirely unattainable, “Petrarchan ladies.”
Let’s begin with the structure of Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence:
The Fair Youth Sonnets 1-126. These poems emphasize the youth and handsomeness of the male poet-speaker’s younger male friend, and express frustration at this youth’s apparent failure to heed the implications of time’s passage. The “fair young man” sonnets also attribute quite a lot of memorializing power to the poetic arts, even though they can’t stop the aging of either the older or younger friend.
Procreation Sonnets 1-17. This block urges the fair youth to find a wife and begin having children with her, lest his dazzling beauty fail—thanks to his own narcissism—to reproduce itself for future generations to enjoy.
Rival Poet Sonnets 78-86. The poet-speaker waxes insecure in this block since what he can urge and do, so can other poets. Some other man may, then, draw the fair youth’s attention to him, and cause him to scorn his original admirer.
The Dark Lady Sonnets 127-152. Most of thesesonnets explore lust, obsession, and fear of betrayal; they focus onthe addictive, destructive dimension of erotic attraction. Not all of the sonnets here are truly “dark” (the term comes up in 127, 131-132, and 147). Some are playful. Sonnets 130 and 138 come to mind since these two poems focus on the need for creative, good-humored deception to keep a love match going. Sonnet 138 sums it up best: “Therefore I lie with her and she with me, / And in our faults by lies we flattered be.” Here, the poet invokes both convenient “lying” (telling lies) and the power of sexual enjoyment (as in “getting laid”).
The Cupid Sonnets 153-154. Together, these two “light” sonnets make the classical point that love is a power beyond human comprehension and control. The poet isn’t issuing a medieval-style retraction or apology for having spent so much time on the subject, but he is suggesting that if we came to him looking for easy answers about dealing with love, we must be disappointed by the end of the cycle. The poet seems to want to offer us a bit of distance from “the fury and the mire of human veins” (to borrow a phrase from Yeats’s poem “Byzantium”) that has preceded these last two sonnets.
Helen Vendler’s Tips: try to identify a “couplet tie” wherein a word that appeared in the first twelve lines of the sonnet appear in some form in the final couplet. In a related sense, look for “key words” that appear in some form from one quatrain to the next. Also notice when such a word seems to be missing. Its absence is probably not an accident, and Vendler refers to that absence by calling it a “defective key word.” Poetry is very compressed writing, so it makes sense that what seems to have been deliberately left out or altered is often important.
Who was Mr. W. H? We can’t be certain, though some commenters say is was William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke, or Henry Wriothsley, Third Earl of Southhampton. (Wriothsley was a fascinating character and something of a rascal—he was involved in brawls at court, and played a role in the Essex conspiracy. He’s the one who commissioned a performance of Shakespeare’s Richard II, which enraged Queen Elizabeth. Henry refused an early marriage to Lady Vere, but later married Eliz. Vernon and had children by her.)
Oscar Wilde’s admirably fact-free theory, as given in his 1889 essay “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” (later enlarged and printed posthumously in 1921), is that Mr. W. H. was an attractive boy-actor named Willie Hughes. [2]
By the way, the critic Margreta de Grazia writes that the real “scandal” for earlier readers and critics of the sonnet sequence is not so much the male-male relationship but the one with the so-called “dark lady” because of the seedy nature of the poet-speaker’s relations with her.
The young man/poet relation isn’t as heavily criticized: a firmly articulated concept of “heterosexuality” in its own right wasn’t developed until around three centuries after Shakespeare’s death. See Robert Matz’s article “The Scandals of Shakespeare’s Sonnets” in ELH 77, no. 2, Summer 2010: “What distinguishes the treatment of the young man and the woman from the 1930s tracks closely with what Katz has called the invention of heterosexuality.”
Matz, following Katz—that’s perfect, Matz & Katz!—writes, “The invention of heterosexuality is the point at which heterosexual desire, at least, is freed from the imperatives of lineage or procreation within marriage to become ‘sexuality,’ a value in and of itself, as an older (re)productive ethic gives way to a modern consumer one.” [3]
The point seems to be that by the 1930s, the concept “heterosexuality” (freed, as Matz writes, of concerns about lineage and procreation) became a positive one that might be used over against the dreaded prospect of “homosexuality.” If that’s the case, we can see why people started looking at the dark lady sonnets more positively, and didn’t dwell so intently on the adulterous and lustful dimension of this implied relationship. Anyhow, let’s leave all the scandalizing aside.
By the way, we don’t know who the “rival poet” was, or who the “dark lady” was. Indeed, why should they be at all—how do we know any of the events in the sonnets really took place? We don’t. So there. I’m glad that I’ve been able to resolve all those questions for you! Some makeup company like L’Oréal or MAC Cosmetics should pick up on the smoky “dark lady” concept and develop a line of products based on it. Maybe they already have. I don’t know.
The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust offers a helpful blog entry, “All the Sonnets of Shakespeare,” regarding what has been conjectured about the order in which the sonnets may have been composed. [4]
Selected Sonnets
From block 3-17, Sonnets of Physical Procreation
Assigned: 3, 5-6, 12, 15, 17.
Let’s focus on a few of the sonnets from this block, which through various frames of reference offer the fair young man incentives to marry and procreate, and warnings about the disadvantages of not doing so.
Sonnet 3 (“Look in thy glasse and tell the face thou vewest”) [Folger pg. 25]
The series of quatrains makes the incentive-laden and admonitory case for material procreation. The first quatrain gives the young man a glimpse of his own lovely face in a “glasse” or mirror, telling him that failing to create a second bearer of that image would “beguile the world” or rob it, deceive it of something it needs.
The second quatrain refers to the deprivation of womankind that will ensue if the young man should fail to take a wife, and alludes to the kind of “selfe love” we may recall from the Greek myth of Narcissus.
The third quatrain explains to the young man that just as his mother sees her youth in him, he will see his youth in the beautiful children he has a chance now to beget, later to see again “Dispight of wrinkles this thy goulden time.”
I think Vendler is right to suggest that we don’t have to read the sonnet’s structure as a stark “either/or” proposition, with the couplet being a stern warning that death will be the young man’s wages if he doesn’t follow his older friend’s advice. Still, the warning is pretty strong, even if it doesn’t erase the positive incentives already given: “Die single and thine Image dies with thee.”
Keats would one day write in his poem Endymion that “A thing of beauty is a joy forever, / It will never pass away.” I think the speaker wants that to be so, and the image that passes without securing its successor image begets at least as much sadness as joy.
Sonnet 17 (“But wherefore do not you a mightier waie / Make warre”) [Folger pg. 53]
Here in the seventeenth sonnet, Shakespeare plays with putting himself on aesthetic trial as a creator from mere furor poeticus, the charge of inspired poetic madness that Plato levels at the Homeric reciter he skewers in his dialog Ion. Plato’s Socrates, we may recall, tended to dismiss art of any kind as a representer or bringer of truth—he saw it as creating only false idols or images of an inauthentic visible world.
The couplet, though, tells the young man that if he procreates, his beautiful children will authenticate his poet-friend’s representations of impossible beauty and goodness. Reality itself will come to the aid of the falsely accused member of the poetic tribe. Nice!
All the same, this happy ending shouldn’t obscure the true confession that follows Sonnet 15’s promise to “ingraft” the young man anew in art, and precedes the sonnets that follow which offer poetic immortality to him: perhaps writing alone can’t guarantee immortality—it needs the supplement of reality itself, as here in Sonnet 17.
In his dialogue Phaedrus, [5] Plato offers us the written word’s myth of origin in his story about the Egyptian god Theuth (or Thoth) who invents writing and presents his invention to King Thamus, promptly rejects it as leading to human laziness: they’ll forget how to retain information in their memory, he thinks. Thamus doesn’t see the written word as any guarantee of permanence, he sees it as a substitute for genuine, verifiable knowledge. However reluctantly, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 17 at least raises this possibility that the old mistrust of writing is true.
18, 20, 30 Sonnets of Aesthetic Recuperation
*Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a Summers day?”) [Folger pg. 55]
Sonnet 18 is amazing, isn’t it? “Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?” Following the first seventeen sonnets, which urge the young man to take a wife and produce heirs to his own beauty, goodness, and estate, the speaker works up the courage to promise him that the very sonnets he’s writing will recuperate and preserve the wondrous qualities of his young friend.
We recognize that the poet here repurposes the ancient conception of the seasons to endow the young man’s handsomeness with immortality: each and every year, we see spring give way to summer, summer to autumn, and autumn to winter and death—but as the speaker says to the young man, “thy eternall Sommer shall not fade.” Death will not cast its long shadow over the youth’s life and vigor, which art will translate to a heavenly ideal.
That’s the essence of this recuperative move: artistic creation replaces physical, material procreation, issuing in a grand promise of immortality that even one’s progeny can’t give. After all, how many great houses have bred themselves into oblivion by Shakespeare’s day?
As Vendler says, the “couplet tie” in Sonnet 18 consists in I/eye(s). There’s an insistent, almost desperate sense here of the poet wanting to hold on to the beautiful idealized form he sees in the younger man. In beholding and writing about this form, it appears, he hopes to preserve thoughts of his own youth. In this hope, he is rather like Yeats’s poet-speaker in “Sailing to Byzantium” seeking eternity by disappearing uniting with a work of art: this is what it means to be delivered into “the artifice of eternity.” [6] Such immortality will be directly granted only to the youth, but implicitly, to the poet as well.
Sonnet 20 (“A Womans face with natures owne hand painted”) [Folger pg. 59]
Sonnet 20, offers in part, as Vendler says, a “myth of origin,” the idea being that nature at first thought to create a woman, but “fell a-doting” and endowed the being with a male sex organ. I would add that this mythos enshrines the classical notion of amicitia perfecta or pure friendship between two men, usually one older and the other an attractive young man. The sonnet pays tribute to the traditionally figured feminine softness and beauty, but it partly takes back such praise by attributing to females a not-so-attractive self-awareness, a strong degree of vanity and cynicism.
We can see this in Milton’s early-modern sex-policing, too: Eve is sublimely lovely, but God invested men with the greater share of power. In Book 4 of Paradise Lost, Adam is said to possess “Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and pure, / Severe but in true filial freedom placed; / Whence true authority in men.” [7]
Well, men have often, it seems, felt intimidated by women’s beauty and by what they may see as a female propensity to use that beauty in the service of control over their male admirers. (“Use” is one of the key words in this sonnet, as Vendler says, with the couplet tie being woman/women). And who can blame women if they do so? They would only be strategizing their way out of the box men always put them in! Ah, the much-posited wiliness of womankind—we may recall Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra 2.2saying of the Egyptian goddess-queen, “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety.” [8]
Anyhow, Sonnet 20 asserts a purity of friendship between the older poet and the young man, a friendship unsullied by sexual desire. Essentially, by the couplet’s ending, the poet is saying, “Look, go ahead and sleep with the ladies—but save your ideal, pure love and fidelity for me.”
We may also notice that it’s easy—too easy—to read Sonnet 20 as defending against a potentially disdainful charge of “queerness,” to use an anachronistic modern term. On the one hand, the speaker brazenly says that his male friend has a passably feminine appearance—he has “A Womans face with natures owne hand painted” and that he is the speaker’s “Master Mistris.” But lest we misunderstand, he says at the end of the third quatrain that nature added “one thing to my purpose nothing.” It isn’t hard to figure out what he’s referring to there. It isn’t the young fellow’s Adam’s apple.
Still, I’ll balance this observation with the observation that modern-day critics—especially queer-theory-based ones—may sometimes assume that people actually need a fully articulated concept of something before they can hate it sufficiently to cause grief. English law demonstrates as much. [9]
So even if early modern criminal law only defined certain acts, and those somewhat vaguely, as unacceptable, it was not acceptable for two males to have a sexual encounter, much less a friendship grounded in sexual acts. I would suggest that the amicitia perfecta concept, going all the way back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, was formulated over against a strong public disdain for what we, today, would call “homosexuality.” I don’t mean that amacitia was a cynical smokescreen for sexual activity. By no means—my suggestion is only that part of its function was to legitimize male-male friendship and preserve it from supposed impurity.
*Sonnet 30 (“When to the Sessions of sweet silent thought”) [Folger pg. 79]
This isn’t a sonnet in which the speaker is bowled over by fresh grief or sorrows—he says that he pursues a regimen of summoning up past woes, bringing them to mind and bewailing them anew; he can “tell ore / The sad account of fore-bemoned moan.” That narratival goal seems to be the purpose of the exercise.
It isn’t that the passion so recalled is anything but real. It isn’t fake or aestheticized passion. Shakespeare’s formulation may remind us of Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800,” in which the author tells us the following about how poetic composition begins:
I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. [10]
Well, fine. But when we get to the couplet, Shakespeare’s speaker tells us that when he thinks upon the fair young man, “All losses are restord, and sorrowes end.” How impressive a claim should we allow this to be?
We might take the word “restored” in two different ways. One is the most emphatic in terms of the claim it makes for the summoning-up: to restore in the sense of “make good,” or “recuperate.” When you lose money, you hope to be made whole for your losses, fully compensated. The second meaning of “restored” could be “put back in its original place.” When you use a relatively full jar of honey, you can then put it back in its place in the cupboard. The honey doesn’t go away, unless you decide never to use it again. So with woes and sorrows, I suppose.
There’s a “sweetness” to the “silent thought” that precedes the speaker’s summoning of old woes. Is this “silent thought” the equivalent of an initial meditative state, a vacuum waiting to be filled with bittersweetness? As mentioned, this business of recollection and composition is not a storm-and-stress kind of operation. For the most part, it comes across as meditative.
As for the couplet, the speaker is saying that the thought of the “deare friend” whom he addresses cures his sadness for a time and stops him from continuing to dwell on his losses. He has something new to enjoy, and does not persist in that bittersweet mainstay of age, thinking upon and dwelling in one’s past. For a time, he thinks like a young man, as if he has been restored to the days of his youth.
Sonnet 36 (“Let me confesse that we two must be twaine”) [Folger pg. 91]
This sonnet confesses and tries to sort out—without much success—the apparent separation of any avowed close friendship between the older speaker and the younger man. Throughout the poem, there’s a sense of confusion, a confused “twoness” and deep, humiliating isolation on the speaker’s part. It isn’t entirely clear what the speaker has done to bring guilt or shame upon himself, though it sounds as if he may be alluding to the dark lady. But his male friend now wants to avoid him or even to disavow him as a companion. As Vendler suggests in so many words, the figured reconciliation seems like wishful thinking.
Sonnet 42 (“That thou hast her it is not all my griefe”) [Folger pg. 103]
This is a sonnet of betrayal. It seems that by this point, the fair young man has taken the dark lady as his mistress, and clearly the poet-speaker isn’t pleased with the situation. There seems to be quite a lot of self-deception involved here.
Although the speaker refers to an almost Girardian triangulation-concept of love’s genesis—to put it simply, René Girard wrote that we find people attractive because we believe other people also find them attractive—his reference still seems naïve. He says, “Thou doost love her, because thou knowst I love her,” and as for the woman, he says, “And for my sake even so doth she abuse me ….” This is, as Vendler says, an attempt to talk himself into the center position when in fact he’s being shut out. It’s really a George Costanza move, isn’t it? The couplet seems to me to be entirely unconvincing.
Sonnet 53 (“What is your substance, whereof are you made”) [Folger pg. 125]
Vendler points out that the main conceit in this poem comes from Plato’s notion of substance and appearance. There aren’t a ton of classical references in the sonnets, but this sonnet is not lacking in them. The young man is able to image forth the excellence of Adonis and Helen alike, along with the spring and the wonderful harvest time of the year. The youth outdoes them all, showing in himself what is beautiful and graceful at all times. Vendler is probably right that the couplet’s reference to the young man’s supposed “constant heart” is a wish, not something the poet believes with any confidence.
*Sonnet 55 (“Not marble, nor the guilded monuments / Of Princes”) [Folger pg. 129]
Sonnet 55 is among the most beloved in the cycle, with its magnificent—one wants to say “monumental”—claim that the poet’s verse will outlast all other ways of memorializing a beloved person. It will supposedly outlast even marble, which after all is almost invariably set up with heartfelt gestures but eventually succumbs to disuse and decay, and winds up (just as the speaker says) “besmeer’d with sluttish time.” In the end, a funeral monument reminds us mostly of the deadness of the mortal person it memorializes. (Still, respect to such monuments: Siste, viator!)
Things are otherwise with a fine sonnet, asserts the speaker, and he proceeds with the boldness of his poetic descendant John Milton, who writes in his 1644 treatise Areopagitica, “Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.” [11]
That’s the way it seems with the present sonnet: it sends forth something of both the poet’s and the young man’s spirit and excellence, so the poet can say, “You live in this [verse], and dwell in lovers eies.” The assumption is that through the ages the sonnet itself will continue to be read, serving as a spark, a piece of magic that will ignite the passions of people in times to come.
*Sonnet 60 (“Like as the waves make towards the pibled shore”) [Folger pg. 139]
Vendler is surely right to suggest that this remarkable sonnet’s quatrains develop something like a tragic view of life, a view the poet opposes with the hope that his own verses will “stand” against the devastating, obliterating passage and effects of time. The sonnet begins with a sense of monotonous, relentless movement: just as the waves steadily arrive to shore, “So do our minuites hasten to their end.” The fair young man, and we, and the poet will all die one day, and nature seems almost impatient—monotony notwithstanding—to be done with us and let others take our place.
Vendler points out that the second quatrain crowns the growing person king, in a sense, and in tragic vein proceeds to take him down. It’s the stuff of the well-known moral text, Mirror for Magistrates. [12] Allegorized as “Nativity,” the child “Crawles to maturity” and is “crown’d.” But just at that point, the heavens turn malign: “Crooked eclipses gainst his glory fight, / And time that gave, doth now his gift confound.” These “eclipses” are prodigies, unhealthy and unnatural mockeries of the natural processes, the rising, arcing, and setting of suns, that helped the child to grow to maturity and full agency.
In the end, the “scythe” of material nature mows down all things before it. But the couplet announces the by-now familiar hope that the poet’s “verse shall stand” to praise the young man’s worth, whatever time, or nature, or any destructive power may do. The iteration of the poet’s own “sequent toile” puts up a counter-force that will “stand” the intentional and malicious ravages of time.
Sonnet 63 (“Against [the time when] my love shall be as I am now”) [Folger pg. 145]
This sonnet resembles Sonnet 60 in its claims for verse, and it concentrates on the inevitable material and temporal processes of aging. The claim is simply that while the beloved’s good looks will pass, the ideal beauty he bodies forth while in his prime will remain, like vital green sap coursing through the black ink of the poem’s words. It’s almost an alchemical or magic touch.
Sonnet 65 (“Since brasse, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundlesse sea”) [Folger pg. 149]
This is another sonnet that dwells on the waste time brings, and how it does them, only to set up the couplet-housed hope that “black inck” may counter such powerful destruction. This sonnet in particular also emphasizes movingly the fragility of such a thing as verse, a delicate quality that the poet figures by his references to physical beauty, flowers, or “summers hunny breath.”
There is a fragility about verse, indeed about language of any kind, written or spoken. Manuscripts crumble into dust, and particular poems and dramas, or even whole genres, may sink into oblivion thanks to changes in taste, morals, and expectations. That sort of falling-away is beyond an artist’s control. The couplet’s by-now expected assertion of hope seems a little tenuous with its “unlesse” conditional tone. Still, the ending is moving: the poet wishes that “in black inck my love may still shine bright.”
*Sonnet 73 (“That time of yeare thou maist in me behold”) [Folger pg. 165]
Vendler suggests that in this beautiful sonnet, the speaker has stopped holding on to memories of his own youth, and he accepts his present state by referring to a tree stripped of its leaves by winter, the day’s twilight, and the glowing of an almost extinguished fire. I would suggest, too, that his angst about mortality and decay now mellows into a bond of reaffirmation. He attributes the perceptions he describes to the fair young man, but it seems clear that they are really his own thoughts.
One simple statement the speaker is making here is that the beloved will miss him when he’s gone, so he should, if he’s wise, show his affection now.
Sonnet 76 (“Why is my verse so barren of new pride?”) [Folger pg. 171]
Vendler sees the poem as a response to a question, which seems right. The young man may have remarked upon the monotony of the “love” theme in a great many of the sonnets. The poet-speaker doesn’t apologize, though he admits the truth of the charge. He tells the young man, “you and love are still my arguments, / So all my best is dressing old words new,” and this newness is like that of the sun, which, as he rightly says, “is daily new and old.”
The final line of the couplet, “So is my love still telling what is told” sounds like a wish that repetition is the mother of reciprocity in such a simple, elemental affair. Repetition may break down the hedges set round the other’s heart.
Well, the charge of sameness is true, at least in the most obvious way. Vendler cites the poet Frank O’Hara’s statement that the substance of most love lyrics is basically, “I need you, you need me, yum yum” (Introduction 14). Okay, that may be oversimplifying it too much. But seriously, there isn’t a lot of high-octane ideation to pass along in a love sonnet, is there? It’s about deep feelings, elemental passions. Metaphors and mileage may vary, but the “guts” of the sonnet won’t change.
It seems that the poet himself sees his sameness-peddling as appropriate to the steady affection he feels for the fair young man. He is certainly a persistent suitor, if that’s the right term. The challenge is to express pretty much the same set of notions and emotions in interesting, at least somewhat novel ways. We may remark that Shakespeare’s sonnet cycle is hardly naïve or simple writing—we don’t call the sonnets’ style “sugared” for nothing. It’s highly wrought stuff. Still, the poet is suggesting that he isn’t trying to make a series of fashion statements, he’s trying to express the abiding nature of his love for a friend.
From 78-86, Sonnets Involving a Rival Poet
Assigned: 84.
Sonnet 84 (“Who is it that sayes most, which can say more”) [Folger pg. 187]
Vendler picks up here on the sacred overtones lent to the “object” to be described in this rival- poet-themed sonnet (see Sonnets 78-86), which is the unparalleled excellence and beauty of the fair young man. The scriptors of the bible had the same problem—how does a writer go about describing an entity (Yahweh) who says, “I AM WHO AM”? [13]
What more is there to say that would not be offensive or marring in its effect? From the writer’s perspective, says the speaker, “Leane penurie within that Pen doth dwell, / That to his subiect lends no some small glory.” It’s no easy task to describe perfection and not resort to florid exaggeration, or mere silence.
The young man, implies the speaker in the couplet, doesn’t do himself any favors by encouraging so many authors to dedicate works of art to him: “You to your beautious blessings adde a curse, / Being fond on praise, which makes your praises worse.” This narcissistic tendency in the young man would seem to spur competition among poets to praise him to the skies, and our poet doesn’t find that an attractive proposition. He is being reminded that his literary project is by no means unique, and that he is in a fight with others who think and feel as he does.
Sonnet 87 (“Farewell thou art too deare for my possessing”)
The presumption of merit seems an illusion in this sonnet: total dedication to the beloved is the point. Perhaps we can get at the poet’s anxiety by referring to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In spite of her disappointment, Helena, spurned by her onetime suitor Demetrius (who now loves Helena’s friend Hermia), puts much faith in the power of love even as she says this profound feeling involves neither judgment nor clarity of vision: “Things base and vile, holding no quantity, / Love can transpose to form and dignity” (1.1.232-33). [14]
Perhaps, then, it is not entirely the qualities in the lover that we love, but rather, at least in part, what we ourselves have projected onto or into the beloved. Love is a thing of fantasy, and is scarcely amenable to reason. Taking this burden to himself, the sonnet’s speaker seems to be suffering from “impostor syndrome.” What if the merit he has been accorded thus far is a mere projection, a fantasy of his own creation? Won’t the beloved end up despising him? What good is it to be “In sleepe a King,” but a pauper or a rejected friend on waking?
Sonnet 94 (“They that have powre to hurt, and will doe none”) [Folger pg. 207]
Vendler sees in this sonnet two halves, each of which amounts to a miniature poem in its own right, each about corresponding realms: vegetative and social. The first two quatrains, that is, make an octave that deals with those excellent and handsome youths who, presumably, seem upright but also chilly in temperament. It sounds like damning with faint praise to say, “They rightly do inherrit heavens graces” and that “They are the Lords and owners of their faces.”
Vendler also wisely suggests that the poet’s switch to the “vegetative” sestet consisting of quatrain 3 and the concluding couplet offers him a way to clarify his feelings about young men like his friend. What if, he may be asking himself, my young friend were in fact a flower? What would I say about him? And here, as Vendler implies, we get an answer: “Lillies that fester, smell far worse then weeds.” This admonition, if that’s the right word to use, harbors some resentment, doesn’t it?
Sonnet 103 (“Alack what poverty my Muse brings forth”) [Folger pg. 225]
The early 100s sonnets are Muse-based, and this one offers us an interesting theory of composition. The speaker’s muse isn’t helping him produce more than silence, and the fair youth has noticed. But what’s a writer to do? As in Sonnet 84, it’s confessed that one can’t improve on perfection, or, in this case, the mirror-image of perfection. As the poet admits, if the fair young man wants to behold his own perfection, he need only find the nearest mirror and gaze into it. He doesn’t need a poet.
As Hamlet says, the artist’s task is “to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to / nature,” and not to try to improve upon it. [15] The mirror has long been a key image for the mimetic theory of art, which says that good artists rightly “copy nature,” meaning that they attempt to represent nature (whether by that we mean human nature, material nature, or both) in a way that does as much justice to it as possible.
But as Vendler points out, the poet will soon change his tune on this issue of poetry and the other arts not being constitutive but rather ancillary (her terms, which I’m borrowing). There are plenty of theories about how and why artists create, and Shakespeare, as a dramatist and poet, doesn’t neatly adhere to any of them. That’s probably why Oscar Wilde could write only half-jokingly in “The Decay of Lying” that the purpose of Hamlet’s mimetic-friendly remark as stated above was only “to convince the bystanders of his absolute insanity in all art–matters.” [16]
Sonnet 106 (“When in the Chronicle of Wasted time”) [Folger pg. 231]
Vendler reminds us that the basic conceit of this sonnet comes from biblical typology, the notion that certain people and events in the Hebrew Scriptures prefigure the life of Christ. All that ancient and medieval “praise of Ladies dead, and lovely Knights,” asserts the poet-speaker, have been folded into the excellence and beauty of the fair young man.
I agree with Vendler that the most sensible reading of lines 11-12, “And for they look’d but with devining eyes, / They had not still enough your worth to sing,” is to emend “still” to “skill” and interpret the two lines as meaning, “earlier artists could only prefigure you so well because they were in some sense inspired, like the prophets in the Scriptures.
The trouble is, as the couplet points out, that present-day poets don’t have the necessary skills even to do more than “wonder”—that is, they “lack toungs to praise.” Wonder is usually a good state of mind to be in when we deal with Shakespeare (especially in his romance plays); it’s a state of being to which extraordinary events open the souls of certain worthy characters. Here in Sonnet 106, although “wonder” is still a good thing, what’s lacking is the rhetorical ability to express what is felt. In early modern times, the literary arts were classed as allied to rhetoric.
*Sonnet 107 (“Not mine owne feares, nor the prophetick soule”) [Folger pg. 233]
In this confident sonnet, the poet’s love seems to exceed all limits individual (“mine owne feares”) and social (“the prophetick soul, / Of the wide world”). The speaker claims that death now “subscribes” to him, or obeys him and that his verses will endow him with immortality: “Ile live in this poore rime.” The couplet brings in the fair young man, who is told, “thou in this [verse] shalt finde thy monument, / When tyrants crests and tombs of brasse are spent.” Is that the same thing as immortality for the beloved? It seems like a less absolute claim than we have seen in some of the earlier sonnets on the same theme.
*Sonnet 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true mindes / Admit impediments”) [Folger pg. 251]
This is an impersonal sonnet—the fair young man is not mentioned—and as Vendler says, it reads as dramatic refutation, not definition. Refutation, that is, of a claim such as, “true love requires perfect reciprocity; you can’t love someone who wrongs or slights you.” Instead, the poet asserts, love is like a pole star by which we may navigate through our lives. This profound feeling “beares it out even to the edge of doome.”
The poem’s rhetorical structure, says Vendler, is “Love is not X, but rather Y.” The phrase “Times foole” is important, as it is the precursor of the same language in Sonnet 124, in which the phrase “fools of time” appears. In the present sonnet, the lines run, “Love’s not Time’s foole, though rosie lips and cheeks / Within his bending sickles compasse come.” Love may be in some sense subject to time’s ravages, but it is not a dupe of Time; it does not obey or subscribe to the power of Time, and even has power to transcend such destruction, at least in the spiritual sense.
Physical beauty is a temporary endowment granted by time and nature, but love is not.
Sonnet 124 (“If my deare love were but the childe of state”) [Folger pg. 267]
In this sonnet, the phrase “fools of time” seems to refer to people who (unlike the speaker, supposedly) draw their life-patterns from the relativistic morals and passing fashions of their own day. This is a sonnet written from the speaker’s weathered perspective on his friendship with the fair young man.
To consider that phrase “Fools of time” in another context, such “fools” may demonstrate the truth of great moral patterns that the fools themselves, in their prime, ignored or rejected. Northrop Frye writes in Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy (U of Toronto Press, 1969)that some rebels, at the point of execution, declare their fidelity to the established order and other positive structures, perhaps to find some consolation in making an amended ending. [17]
Frye continues that the term “fool,” when Shakespeare uses it “in connection with time, nature, and fortune … means essentially the person to whom things happen, the one who cannot control events.” [18]
The sonnet-speaker’s point is that he, the true lover, is not among the fools of time—his love is built to last. He calls such people to witness as if he himself were on trial for his constancy. There seems to be some irony in that stance—in the end, aren’t we all “fools of time” simply by virtue of being mortal, by virtue of being among what the Greeks called the brotoi, the dying ones? None of us can control that fact of human life. Not the heroes, or the less-than-heroes who live on in the wake of the heroes’ destruction.
From block 127-52, The Dark Lady Sonnets
Assigned: 127, 129, 130, 133, 138, 144, 147.
*Sonnet 127 (“In the ould age blacke was not counted faire”) [Folger pg. 273]
This is the first “dark lady” sonnet in the cycle. Apparently, “dark is the new blonde.” Vendler writes that the speaker has cast her appearance as a “myth of origin.” To wit, now that cosmetics have made it possible for all women to go fair, their use has devalued the once-proud standard. As Yogi Berra supposedly said of some club or restaurant, “No one goes there—it’s too crowded.” But the joke isn’t on the non-blondes, it’s on the flaxen-haired folk. The lady with black eyes protests so becomingly, the sonnet tells us, that now the fashion is all for black hair, dark complexions, and so forth. That’s the way fashion goes, isn’t it?
Well, where’s that poetic genius and weirdly aesthetic-moralist Charles Baudelaire when you need him? In The Painter of Modern Life, the French poet and critic boldly asserts in keeping with his à rebours decadent ethos that the application of cosmetics was a fitting and enlightened countermeasure against tyrannical nature, which he tends to treat as shot through with greedy desire, unattractive, chaotic, and redolent of death. “Nature,” he writes, “advises nothing but crime.” [19]
We wouldn’t expect Shakespeare to talk or write like that about nature, of course, but in his own early-modern way, the dramatist promotes artifice as essential to human life. Anyone who has read or watched King Lear understands that “raw nature” (whether human or environmental) isn’t a place Shakespeare believes we should expose ourselves to for very long.
*Sonnet 129 (“Th’expence of spirit in a waste of shame”) [Folger pg. 279]
The second of the dark lady sonnets is one for the ages. What about all that at times fulsome praise of idealized male-male friendship the poet served up in the earlier sonnets? This poem seems defensive in its frank, startling analysis of the power of raw, “dark” sexuality to smash any and all idols and ideals.
Vendler asks the right question about how to interpret this sonnet, I think, with its “submission to lust”: she asks, should we read it as structured “passionally and chronologically—just as it sequentially happened from initial excitement to shame and analysis—or analytically and retrospectively, as one looks back on that submission in later evaluation” (550). The trouble is, she goes on to say, that what seems to be an analytic retrospective breaks down into something more passional. So it’s as if the power of the feeling being explored reawakens the feeling itself.
As everyone knows and has known since ancient times, sex has a way of making people think other than logically, or just not think at all—that’s hardly news. But knowledge doesn’t always lead to wisdom, so sex tends to strip us even of the dignity of the tragic vision.
One other thing: the couplet reads, “All this the world well knowes, yet none knowes well, / To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.” Should we take the word “men” strictly here? Is it supposed to be only men who experience sexuality this way? That seems unlikely, especially given the context of the sonnet itself, in which the speaker’s “dark lady” is made out to be a seductress.
In Sonnets 131-132, the poet’s defense of his lover’s dark complexion and eyes continues his self-defense for submitting to his lust for her.
Sonnet 130 (“My Mistres eyes are nothing like the Sunne”) [Folger pg. 281]
One wants to say that this poem might be read in a partly serious vein, in keeping with the sometimes dark and defensive meanings we draw from most of the other dark lady sonnets, but it’s hard to see how to pull that off. The sonnet reads as a standalone sendup of the “Petrarchan lady” ideal. [20] By Shakespeare’s time, this ideal had become a bit shopworn, so often did poets resort to it. We know that the Petrarchan lady is incredibly beautiful and all but unapproachable. Well, not the speaker’s mistress! The couplet is delightful: “And yet by heaven I thinke my love as rare, / As any she beli’d with false compare.”
The pronoun “she” should be treated as an eccentric noun meaning “any woman.” In other words, the woman isn’t doing the comparing; others are making comparisons about her and thus misrepresenting her.
Sonnet 133 (“Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groane”) [Folger pg. 287]
A triangle-based sonnet, along with 131-132. Vendler points out that what began as a plea for the male beloved in this prison-themed sonnet turns into an acknowledgement that the dark lady has the poet-speaker tightly bound in spite of her sinful, cheating behavior with the fair young man. Identities here are so confounded that there seems no way out for the speaker. As he says in address to the dark lady, “I being pent in thee, / Perforce am thine and all that is in me.”
*Sonnet 138 (“When my love sweares that she is made of truth”) [Folger pg. 297]
This sonnet ends comically with, “in our faults by lyes we flattered be.” The poem may seem less comical when we consider the matrix in which it is embedded, but still, it reads as fully detachable and comic in spirit: full truth and love don’t mix. Shakespeare won’t condemn artifice except when it’s the handmaid of grasping selfishness and cruelty. Rhetorical artifice, he seems to suggest, is sometimes entirely necessary in a relationship. “Simple truth” can be needlessly destructive at times, as we all know.
One question we might ask as we read through the catalog of deceptions and false-speakings is, does either partner believe any of these things? The older man acts as if he believes his mistress even though he knows she is lying, so that she might think him young and untutored, right? But does she believe that? Does it even matter?
There’s a sense in which the speaker’s logic resembles that 1984-ish way of knowing and not knowing, believing and not believing, something. 2 +2 make 4, but also they make 5, or 7, or whatever they need to make. The human spirit seems capacious enough to manage a little erotic doublethink, a patch of Newspeak subterfuge now and then. Anything to smooth things over. How else can we interpret a line such as, “I do beleeve her though I know she lyes”?
*Sonnet 144 (“Two loves I have of comfort and dispaire”) [Folger pg. 309]
This sonnet shows the speaker feeling trapped in a triangle, in which “The better angell is a man right faire” and “The worser spirit a woman collour’d il.” It seems that by the poem’s end, as Vendler suggests, “we infer the friend has indeed turned fiend” (144) since, as the couplet admits, the speaker hopes that his “bad angel [may] fire my good one out.”
Oscar Wilde’s romantic interest Lord Alfred Douglas would later take inspiration from the sonnet’s title line, writing a poem called “Two Loves,” which ends notoriously, “‘I am the love that dare not speak its name.’” [21]
Sonnet 147 (“My love is as a feaver longing still”) [Folger pg. 315]
The speaker all but despairs over his obsession with the dark lady, who troubles and perhaps exploits his other relationship. He complains that she deranges his reasoning power, and confesses regarding his rhetorical or poetical skills, “My thoughts and my discourse as mad mens are.” He is fundamentally confused, and ends the poem bitterly with, “For I have sworne thee faire, and thought thee bright, / Who art as black as hell, as darke as night.”
The remaining sonnets before the end of this 127-152 block, 148-151, offer little to no solace to the speaker or reader. It seems as if, as was once said of the thundering prose of Thomas Carlyle, the writer has “led us into the wilderness and left us there.” He and we are left, that is, in a wilderness of passion, still trying to make our way forward with a poet who may be forever lost among a tangled, hellish thicket of hearts.
From block 153-54, The Cupid Sonnets
Assigned: 153, 154.
Sonnet 153 (“Cupid laid by his brand and fell a sleepe”) [Folger pg. 327]
These sonnets withdraw to a classical distance, providing perspective. Were they written last? Who can say? Maybe we should draw hope from the fact that this troublesome topic of love/eroticism can be so treated, that poetry need not only add to the confusion and the mire, but may attenuate it, or bring understanding. Still, the question is whether being able to articulate something gives us any power over it.
We know that in tragedy, if we are talking about tragic paths and outcomes, the strict answer is “no,” though in a manner that scarcely vitiates the power and value of tragedy. But this is a romantic sonnet cycle, not a tragic play, that we are dealing with. In these final sonnets, does the poet give us a kind of knowledge or perspective that allows us to stand outside love’s strife for a while? What does it mean if we, the readers or the audience, say along with Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as he surveys the humans’ love-strife, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” [22]
The poems leading toward the concluding two sonnets show the speaker torn by the recognition of what’s happening, yet feeling unable to make it right. No resolution is achieved as the last declarations of love and acts betrayal unfold. Even with some likely rearrangement in the 1609 Quarto, we don’t get anything like surety, let alone a happy ending to the whole affair.
Sonnet 154 (“The little Love-God lying once a sleepe”) [Folger pg. 329]
See above comments on Sonnet 153.
Edition. Mowat, Barbara A. and Paul Werstine, eds. Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Poems. Folger Shakespeare Library. Simon & Schuster, 2006. ISBN-13: 978-0743273282.
Copyright © 2026 Alfred J. Drake
ENDNOTES
*To return to exact part of the text referenced by the endnotes below, left-click on the endnote’s numbered link. By contrast, the blue scroll-up button at the bottom right of the page returns to the top of the document.
[1] References to “Vendler” refer to comments by Helen Vendler in her excellent edition of the sonnets The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Amazon info). Harvard Belknap, 1999. ISB-13: 978-0674637122. My quotes from the sonnets are taken from the 1609 Quarto edition that Vendler in part uses. I like the early-modern spellings, though I’ve tidied up some of the conventions for easier reading—for example, I don’t spell modern “v” with a “u” or use the long “s” that contemporary readers often find confounding. To view a facsimile copy of the 1609 Quarto, visit “Shakspere’s Sonnets, The First Quarto, 1609” (Internet Archive).
[2] Wilde, Oscar. “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” (Gutenberg E-Texts).
[3] Matz, Robert. “The Scandals of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” ELH, vol. 77, no. 2, 2010, pp. 477–508. Accessed 3 June 2026. You can view this article with a free JSTOR account. The citation for de Grazia’s essay is Margreta de Grazia, “The Scandal of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” Shakespeare Survey 46 (1993): 49.
[4] Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. “All the Sonnets of Shakespeare.” 9 Sept. 2020. Accessed 6/2/2026.
[5] Plato. Phaedrus, translated by Benjamin Jowett. Gutenberg e-texts. Accessed 6/3/2026.
[6] Yeats, William Butler. “Sailing to Byzantium.” Poetry Foundation. Accessed 6/2/2026.
[7] Milton, John. Paradise Lost, Book 4. Milton Reading Room. Accessed 6/3/2026.
[8] Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra. 2.2.276-77. Folger Shakespeare Library. Accessed 6/3/2026.
[9] See the “Buggery Act” of 1533 (1533: 25 Henry 8 c.6: The Buggery Act). , which Elizabeth I reinstated from her father Henry VIII’s time. At least nominally, hanging was prescribed for the act of buggery (which was broadly defined and not necessarily limited to male-male sexual acts, though it excluded lesbian activity) along with confiscation of one’s estate. See The Statutes Project at statutes.org.uk. Accessed 6/2/2026.
[10] Wordsworth, William. “Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800.” Gutenberg e-texts. Accessed 6/3/2026.
[11] Milton, John. “Areopagitica.” The Milton Reading Room. Accessed 6/3/2026.
[12] See The Mirror for Magistrates. HathiTrust. Accessed 6/3/2026.
[13] See Exodus 3:17. 1599 Geneva Bible at biblegateway.com. Accessed 6/3/2026.
[14] Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 1.1.238-39. Folger Shakespeare Library. Accessed 6/3/2026.
[15] Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. 3.2.23-24. Folger Shakespeare Library. Accessed 6/3/2026.
[16] Wilde, Oscar. “The Decay of Lying.” Archive.org. Accessed 6/3/2026.
[17] See Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy (U of Toronto Press, 1969; repr. 1996, Amazon info). I have used a different reprint, so page numbers may not match. In this great series of essays, Frye divides up the relevant Shakespeare plays—and notice that not all of the ones mentioned below are strictly tragedies—as consisting in Tragedies of Order (in which a rebel brings about a false order that gives way to chaos, and then to a nemesis or arch-opponent who restores order: see Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Hamlet); Tragedies of Passion (in which personal desires conflict with social responsibilities—see Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Troilus and Cressida, and Coriolanus); and Tragedies of Isolation (in which a failure in understanding wreaks havoc for the increasingly isolated hero and almost everyone around him or her—see King Lear, Othello, and Timon of Athens).
[18] Frye. Fools of Time, 88. As Frye sees it, tragedy requires heroes (good or bad) whose “heroic energy” destroys them when they try to rise above ordinary time and human limitations. He defines this energy as “a capacity for action or passion, for doing or suffering, which is above ordinary human experience” (4-5). Everyone is subject to time, but tragic heroes don’t acknowledge the fact. I would add to what Frye writes that, like all those who go against god or the gods, such “fools” end up proving a point in spite of themselves. In Paradise Lost, Milton’s Satan will prove to be the great archetype of them. He has made himself grossly finite by his prideful sins, and even though he dedicates himself to bringing evil from God’s goodness, he always gets trapped in a falsely circular conception of time that he thinks he can either control or ride into eternity as God’s perpetual enemy.
[19] Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life. Ch. XI. “In Praise of Adornment.” Translated by A. S. Kline from the 1863 French original text, Le Peintre de la vie moderne (Wikisource).The French quotation runs, « la nature ne peut conseiller que le crime. » Accessed 6/3/2026.
[20] Petrarch’s Sonnet 90 in his Canzoniere is a good poem for comparison since it contains lines such as “Her way of moving was no mortal thing” (“Non era l’andar suo cosa mortale”). This poem also demonstrates that Petrarch is far more sophisticated than his parodists allow—he laments that the etherial beauty he’s describing is now a thing of the past. Trans. A. S. Kline. At petrarch.petersadler.com. Accessed 6/3/2026.
[21] Douglas, Lord Alfred. “Two Loves.” Poets.org. Accessed 6/3/2026.
[22] Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 3.2.117. Folger Shakespeare Library. Accessed 6/3/2026.